Originally Posted by
Miztah
I'd like to clarify some things mentioned in here. First of all, we've been open to accepting new developers since the project opened, there has never been a point where we didn't accept worthwhile additions to the team. The reality is, our codebase is dauntingly large and complex, and very difficult for anyone new to jump into and make any sort of meaningful development progress at this point. We occasionally get people willing to contribute small changes, but big feature additions are something that would take a very through understanding of the code to even attempt. Most new people aren't willing to put that kind of time into the project, so our team rarely grows.
Also, this information doesn't mean we're abandoning JTL. For the moment, we're accepting the reality that none of us have as much free time to develop as we did in the past, and it's not worth holding back a major project milestone by tacking on multiple additional years of development while we try and work out a new backend.
We're considering 1.0 as our "the ground game is done" milestone, which means that large population test servers like Basilisk won't be necessary anymore. So at that point, when we're confident with the ground game's status is complete, we can move on to working on our own live play server environment without the 14.1 constraints. We'll still continue to make fixes to our 14.1 codebase as LK said, but we'll also be open to do our own custom changes as well.
However, don't think this means 1.0 or SunCrusher are coming soon. We've still got some major feature sets to complete first (new AI, imperial crackdown, gambling, etc), so at the very least 1 or 2 more publishes before we can say we're happy with how complete it is. Don't let it affect your decision to play, because Basilisk will still be up for a long time, and we may consider keeping it running when we spin up our own play server down the road.
So don't take this news as the team giving up on anything. Many of us want to work on JTL, but the reality is it's going to take a good amount of time. Having 1.0 not include JTL allows us to have a reasonable timeframe to completion, and it allows our player base to finally play the game without the negative affects of a testing environment like exists on Basilisk. At that point, we're able to keep poking at JTL at our own pace without the community having to wait years longer for a play server.
